Slow down, Bandwagon. Time for me to jump on.
I’ve seen a few posts lately (namely from Carlos Whitaker, Michael Hyatt, and a few others) about Twitter strategy – follow back, don’t follow back, un-follow everyone, cancel your account altogether. Although I am hardly the most followed, most guru-iest tweeter around, I have picked up a few things here and there that I thought I would share.
- To follow back or not? Yes. For the most part, if you follow me and are a human, I will follow back. If you are a company, only tweet appearance schedules, have a link in every tweet, or are only SEO techniques and more follower strategies… no thanks.
- The beauty of lists. I have two main lists: a private list that I read instead of my timeline, and a list of tweeters from my church. Since Twitter got a little squirrely the other day, I resurrected a previous account to be my backup list account, from which I do not tweet, DM, or reply. I just read it. But now that lists are back up and running, I’m back on my @jonwellman account exclusively.
- Hootsuite FTW. Love it. Couldn’t do Twitter the same without it. This is my main screen.
Here I have my main list, Facebook (names edited out for privacy), my Twitter stream, and my mentions. There is some other stuff to the right… DMs and church’s feeds. Works very well for me. - No rules. I am on Twitter because I ENJOY it. I like the people I get to know, the conversations we have, the insights I get to read on a daily basis. These are the ways I choose to manage this tool, but they are not set in stone and they are not for everyone. If this helps someone navigate the tweetable waters, great.
What are you Tools of the Tweet? How do you keep your sanity 140 characters at a time?
Not a Camouflaged Soul 
I do twitter the hard way…from the Twitter web site and from a PC ( I don’t own a cell phone). Haven’t checked out hootsuite, perhaps I should. I don’t like that when I retweet via Twitter I can’t edit it–also, when I reply via Twitter it loses the context and often just serves to confuse the recipient. On the other hand, that could just be me sowing confusion…
I mostly use Twitter to help alert me to things I wouldn’t naturally find–and mostly for (IT) business purposes, since I’m paid to read broadly, dig deeply, publish with focus, innovate specifically, and try not to stress out in the process. 😉
I also use it to keep up on some Christian-specific items; people, businesses, etc.
I follow as many as I can keep up with…I don’t really care for the “I’m brushing my teeth” or “burped” tweets, but accept it as a given–however, that & overly noisy tweeters prod me towards unfollowing–mostly because it jams out my available time to scan the Twitter website.
@CTO_to_go … brush my teeth…
Hootsuite is available as a Chrome extension, which would be handy for you. It also gives you the option to edit RTs. And your replies are not any more confusing than the tweets they reference. 🙂
Lists would help filter out the burping tweets. Or, there are some some excellent burping tweeters that might change your perspective on the genre. Tweet on…
So you prefer hootsuite over tweetdeck?
I do. When Tweetdeck was via Steam only, it locked up and crashed too often for me. Now that it is also on Chrome, I find its interface a little clunky. I like that Hootsuite is web only, so using it across multiple platforms isn’t an issue. It’s scheduling also seems to be more reliable.
Thanks for stopping by!